April 28, 2016

If you enjoy table tennis this trainer might be a great next project. Thomas Mayer created this as his bachelor thesis project. Two Playstation CL-eye cameras are used to view the play area and track the ball. A project is then used to display game elements that the players can interact with to play many game scenarios. The game was created using VVVV which is a visual/textual live-programming environment for easy prototyping and development.

“The basic idea of my bachelor thesis was to track the ping pong ball in realtime to create data visualisations for trainers and players. After a few weeks of working I started developing a projected mapped interface for the ping pong table to show the collected data. By projecting game obstacles on the surface I figured out that I can change the game play totally.”

December 13, 2015

Laser Duel is a project made by XiaoXing Zhao, Fred Kummer and Douglas Katz for their ECE 4760Final Project. The two guns use Nordic nRF24L01 radio transceivers to talk back to a base station which monitors the game play and keeps score. Each gun has some visual indications so the players can see what the health is and there is also a speaker for some audible indications for things such game over.

“Each gun has an infrared emitter for shooting and an infrared detector that detects if the player using the gun was shot. We designed the shooting mechanism such that when the player presses a trigger on the gun a 38 kHz infrared wave will be emitted. If such IR radiation is detected by another gun, then the shot registers as a hit and the player being hit will lose one point of health. Each player starts off with 8 health and the game will end once a player reaches 0 lives, or if someone operating the basestation signals to end the game early. We equipped the guns with a ultra low power radio that sends vital statistics about the player such as player health and player identification to the base station.”

“We use a Sony Handycam DCR-DVD108 as the camcorder to monitor the table tennis game. The NTSC video feed of the camera was used as an input to the DE2-115, where it was split into YCbCr components to isolate the green content of each frame. The luma component of each frame (Y) was not taken into account in order to allow for flexibility in the lighting of each frame. Thresholds for the blue and red component (Cb and Cr, respectively) were determined experimentally to match the color of the green balls. In order to reduce the influence of noise from other green objects in the room, we spray painted the balls a neon green color to ensure the color of the balls was distinct, much like green screen technology used in film and television.”

“Coming soon to the Adafruit Learning System, a project to make paper Minecraft blocks that interact with the game on a Raspberry Pi using NFC (near field communication)! Swiping a block on the Adafruit PN532 NFC reader causes it to be created in a Minecraft world running on a Raspberry Pi.”

March 9, 2015

Video game play used to be an activity that was played in an arcade with a pocket full of quarters. There is still a huge following for these classic games. Thanks to the repair work that guys like arcadeuk do they will be kept running for years to come. It is interesting to see that there are lots of mods that improve things like the need for battery backups etc. I am glad that there isn’t the same nostalgia keeping 286 computers running!

February 21, 2015

Dragao has a Sonic Cartridge that had some invalid instructions that would cause the game to crash at a certain point. The solution wasn’t to find a replacement game at the local flea market, he Resurrected the Sega Cartridges using some old Computer Chips. The game was originally loaded on 16 bit memory chips, not having any of these handy from the donor computer motherboards he piggy backed 2 8 bit memory chips to make it work. An Arduino was then used to blast the code onto the new chips.